March 6, 2014
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Emily is going to college!
Being Emily has been picked as part of the curriculum for a Spring 2014 Intro to LGBTQ Studies course taught by Dr. Lisa Hager at the University of Wisconsin - Waukesha. Other books in the curriculum include: Michelle A. Gibson, Jonathan Alexander, and Deborah T. Meem's Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies Kate Bornstein's My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name I can't adequately say how excited I am that Emily gets a spot next to Audre Lorde and Kate Bornstein! Kate is a huge influence on me and any time she and the world of Emily intersect, it's wonderful (see below). I'm also delighted that Being Emily is part of the course called "Queering Digital Spaces," as you know I'm a huge fan of digital spaces and what they make possible for gender expression.
I do have the best job in the world
Wednesday afternoon I got to visit the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at Valley View Middle School in Bloomington and read a bit from Being Emily and from the sequel that will be out next year. This is my second favorite aspect of being an author: talking to people about the book, the process, the ideas in the book, and in this case also video games. (My first favorite aspect of being an author, you might be able to guess, is writing books.) It's unusual for a middle school to have a GSA and the turnout was really impressive with about 15-20 students and a bunch of supportive teachers and other adults. I can't imagine what it would have been like for my middle school to have a GSA. I came out in high school and was lucky to have at least one friend who was a little older and GLBT-supportive. It's great to see that access to supportive peers and adults is much more open these days. The event was set up by RECLAIM, an amazing facility in Uptown Minneapolis that helps LGBT youth gain access to mental health support. They're sourcing book circles for Being Emily and Kirstin Cronn-Mills' Beautiful Music for
Book Festivals!
I like to think that fall is book season (along with summer and winter and maybe spring). The air is crisp, it's a good time to curl up with a novel or, if you're feeling more social, to head out in search of your favorite novelists. I'll be at two book festival in the near future: Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books, Sat. & Sun. Sept 21-22. I'm on the panel ”OUTspoken & OUTfront: LGBTQ Writers Moving Beyond Binaries.” (At 4:30 p.m. on Saturday in N129.) Twin Cities Book Festival, Sat. Oct. 12. I was on a panel last year and had a great time. Not sure if I'm doing anything official this year, but I'm definitely going to hang out. Book festivals are great because they're about books (I know, right?) and this tends to attract other book-lovers, which makes for a really great group of people to hang out with while to listen to authors say smart and/or funny things and get to shop for books. If you're around for either book festival, stop by and say hi!
Apocalypse as a metaphor for compassion
This morning I woke up cranky and started thinking about apocalyptic stories, particularly the one in Mass Effect 3, and wondering if there's a way in which they allow us to deal with our own sadness for the suffering we can't fix in the world, and therefore open a path for us to become more compassionate. The game starts with Earth under attack from an alien machine race known as the Reapers, who have come to wipe out all sentient, organic life in the galaxy. Massive robots rain down from the sky. Billions are killed. In the midst of my bad mood, that felt comforting. I thought of Commander Shepard in the opening sequence standing in the open door of the Normandy and watching a small fraction of the evacuation, only to see the evacuation shuttles shot down a moment later. She must turn away from the destruction and go look for help for Earth. Here's a short video of it (even if you're not into games, I think you'll find it moving). This scene reminded me of a quote from the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa: "Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and
What is a meditation retreat like anyway?
A friend asked me about the meditation retreat I just atteneed and I thought that was probably a good topic for a blog. I’d been trying to learn to meditate since I was 15 (and failing!). In 2004 I attended the first Meditating with the Body program with Reggie Ray and actually started to learn to meditate in a way that works for me. It’s different for everyone, but for me having a 6-month program with a meditation instructor to ask questions and weekly assignments, plus a focus on the body (including physically how to sit), really worked. But enough backstory, what actually happens at a meditation retreat? Well, we sit. And then we walk, really slowly, and then we sit again. Sometimes we lie down. The first five-and-a-half days of the program were held in silence. This means there was no talking except when Reggie was teaching and then it was mainly him talking, unless someone got up to ask a question. The silence included evenings and I didn’t even open my computer most evenings. If you had to communicate something, you wrote a note or did your best with pantomime for items like, “Would you pass me a napkin?” Oh and there was functional talking during ROTA (which is a volunteer work
Witches, Werewolves and Starship Captains: Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy
On Friday, March 8 for International Women’s Day, Catherine Lundoff and I hosted a radio program on KFAI. You can hear it here.Since we ran through a whole lot of names and titles during the show, we thought we’d list them on our blogs for anyone who wanted to follow up on our recommendations (or add some of your own in the comments). You can see Catherine’s picks over on her blog. These are roughly in order that we mention them, though not exactly. Rachel Pollack – Unquenchable Fire, Temporary Agency, Godmother Night, and more Robin McKinley – Sunshine (named as an example of an urban fantasy with a vampire rather than paranormal)Louisa May Alcott – She wrote more than Little Women, check out her tales of suspense!Emma Bull – War for the Oaks (wonderful urban fantasy set in Minneapolis)Nnedi Okorafor – Akata Witch (amazing young adult urban fantasy set in Nigeria)Charlaine Harris – The Sookie Stackhouse books on which the HBO show True Blood is basedPatricia Briggs – Check out her Mercy Thompson seriesJacqueline Carey – If you only know her Kushiel books, I also highly recommend her novels Santa Olivia and Saints AstrayKim Harrison – The Hallows seriesTate Hallaway
MarsCon 2013
I'm on four panels for MarsCon March 1-3. If you're planning on attending, I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Below are the panels I'm on and you can see the full program here. Gender Limitations in SF/F Re(a)d Mars/Taylor (2nd Floor) — Friday 06:00 pm Discuss how strong female characters are frequently portrayed as abandoning most, if not all, things feminine. Also, male characters who take on what are considered traditionally female roles are being portrayed as emasculated. Can a powerful female character be warm and nurturing and can a house husband be more than a punch line? With: W. Scott Patterson, mod.; Rachel Gold, Lyda Kimberly Long-Ewing, Lyda Morehouse, Kathryn Sullivan Social Media Marketing for Creatives & Geeks Krushenko’s (13th Floor) — Saturday 01:00 pm Strategies and tips for successfully marketing your geeky creative endeavor or business on various social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn will be discussed. With: Hal Bichel, mod.; Rachel Gold, Christopher Jones, Heather Luca, Catherine Lundoff, David Schwartz Diversity of Character Re(a)d Mars/Taylor (2nd Floor) — Saturday 02:00 pm A lot of the characters in speculative fiction have similar personalities to most fans. Are writers limiting their audience by failing to include characters that express the whole range of diverse human personalities? Who’s good at doing this? What techniques do writers use to design characters unlike themselves? With: Rebecca Chesin, Andre Guirard, co-mods.;
My Next Big Thing
If you’ve been following the “Next Big Thing” blog hop going around author websites, you may have seen my post on the Being Emily site announcing that the sequel is in progress. There’s more exciting news. I recently signed the contract for another book to come out next year – a romantic paranormal novel. The details about the book are below but I also want to add that this book and any others in its series will be out under my pen name “Rachel Calish.” As you can see, I’m not using the pen name to cover my identity, rather it’s to distinguish the two kinds of books that I write. Young adult is a very different genre than romantic paranormal, so I wanted to let readers decide for themselves if they want to read in both genres rather than assuming that someone who loved Being Emily will automatically want to read my paranormal novels. What is the working title of your next book? The Demon Abraxas What genre does your book fall under? Romantic paranormal/urban fantasy What is the synopsis or blurb of your book? Having escaped the poverty and violence of her childhood, Ana thought she didn’t have room for any more inner demons until she met one who knew more about being human than she did. Ana Koury knows there’s more to life